California: Berkeley

As Bob Dylan wrote, "everybody must get stoned".  I think he wrote that about the children of Berkeley.

Berkeley has been a community, since the early 1900's where the law, traditions and respect has been in the textbooks, only.

The parents of Berkeley show their children early about drug use--they use drugs openly and demand legalization elsewhere.

"Ninth and 11th graders reported being drunk or stoned on school property at twice the state and national numbers (30 percent for Berkeley ninth graders and 55 percent for 11th graders) and twice as many students reported smoking marijuana in the last 30 days compared to state and national students who took the same survey.

Leaving aside the fact that the only place Bush war criminal John Yoo should be teaching is Ft. Leavenworth, it has particularly irked me (and others) that he's teaching at UC-Berkeley.  Besides the fact that I attended Berkeley for my public policy degree, the fact that a war criminal was still receiving a state check quite bothered me.

Well, he's taking a break from the state paycheck to move on up to Chapman Law School:

In Berkeley, city leaders branded him a war criminal and human rights activists put up a billboard to denounce him. But in suburban Orange County, Professor John Yoo -- the primary architect of the Bush administration's policy on harsh interrogation techniques that many consider torture -- has found relatively calmer waters.

As head of the Department of Toxic Substances Control, Maureen Gorsen has a key role in implementing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Green Chemistry Initiative. This effort, begun in 2007 and written into law with two pieces of legislation in September, will seek to categorize thousands of chemicals used in products, weeding out the harmful ones for safer alternatives.

Tell me about the new Wiki site.

When a new law is passed, and we have a timeline to develop regulations until January, 2011, what usually happens is for about a year, the regulators sit in a room and debate issues and come up with drafts and they go back in forth with this whole process.